Du fonctionnalisme à l’idéologisme : vers une critique de la critique dans Mythologies

There are so many impersonal, indeed functionalist, expressions used in Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) with which to characterise social power: ‘Order’, ‘status quo’, ‘common sense’. Indeed, the functionalist approach allows Barthes to use ideologism to expose the way in which myth is able to move freely in society. Furthermore, functionalism is interested not only in removing all human agency in the creation and circulation of myths, but also in measuring a mythical phenomenon by its effects; as Barthes put it in 1954 : “we judge the harm caused by myth, not its inaccuracy”. If ideologism informs these acts of judgment, then this approach is linked to political activity for Barthes in 1953, for whom “introducing explanation into myth is the only effective form of militancy for the intellectual”. Does this intellectual voluntarism mean that Mythologies is part of “a politically committed current” of sociology described by Barthes in a 1956 radio interview with Jean Amrouche? Can functionalism and ideologism play a role in what Barthes calls “the demystification of the whole of social relations”? Whilst pointing to the roots of Barthes’s method in Marx’s The Germany Ideology and perhaps even more so in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, this critique of the functionalist sociology deployed by Barthes in Mythologies suggests also the continued influence of phenomenology in radical 1950s thought and writing.